strange except, by Daniel Carter

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Honeydew is a word referring to the high-pressure, sugar-rich sap that builds up in trees and is excreted through insects, creating a sticky, honey-like rain. The phenomenon is particularly notable when late summer weather is dry and abnormally hot and, in Nashville, Tennessee, when hackberry trees become infested with Shivaphis celti, the Asian woolly hackberry aphid, which was first observed in the United States in the 1990s.

strange except is an agglomeration of experiences from the late summer and early fall of 2025. Its fragments obsessively collect textures, textiles, colors and quotations: sap and wool and tennis balls, the unexpected pleasure of purple and the flickering memory of a movie’s end.

Daniel Carter is a poet living in Nashville, TN. His previous chapbook, Here Both Sweeter, won the Wick Poetry Chapbook Contest and was published by Kent State University Press.